It Happened One Paranoid Delusion

In this, the seventh episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In, Nathaniel, Nick, and I finally have some serious disagreements: is It Happened One Night absolutely perfect, or only nearly so? Can one really get enough of Claudette Colbert in this movie, or is her screen time sufficient? Are there enough pitch-perfect scenes, or should there have been one more? Readers, it's a surprise we didn't resort to physical violence to resolve these issues.

And then there's the whole issue of A Beautiful Mind, which also nearly resulted in tears: is it really bad, or just relentlessly average and anonymous? Do we care not a whit about the main characters' relationships, or is there a glimmer of something worth paying attention to? Is Ron Howard a boring, characterless director, or is he in fact devoid of a heart?

Head on over to Nathaniel's Film Experience Blog to discover just how close we were to tearing each other's hair out in this contentious discussion.

One of the problems with this series is that in the interest of not driving readers away with our blathering, we try to keep the entries somewhat short. This is a problem because I could go on all night about how wonderful It Happened One Night is, and how it gets better every time I see it. It's obviously the best screwball comedy ever made, and according to my own stupid, outdated Top 100 list, it's also the 13th best film ever made. That list needs lots of fixing, but this film's place is secure.

But calling it a screwball comedy seems to sell it short, because there's so much more to it than the madcap antics of its followers. It leaves those films (mostly) in the dust on the comedy side of things, but it also has more of a heart and more of a brain than most of them, a fact that's still surprising even after seeing it the third or fourth time. The scenes between Colbert and Walter Connolly (as her father) have become my favorites because they depict one of the most fully developed and complicated parent/adult child relationships I can remember seeing in a comedy. It's a shame the Best Supporting Actor category was still a couple years away, because Connolly would have been a lock.